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‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

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Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#2
Great phtograph of a beautiful kitchen, complete with a chef providing catered lunches, captioned with a description of how the company had to lay off staff because the company executives can't figure out how to make money. Perhaps that should come before the chef? Why is it such a badge of pride to provide perks on other people's dime? Silicon Valley in a nutshell.

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#3
post #2

Great phtograph of a beautiful kitchen, complete with a chef providing catered lunches, captioned with a description of how the company had to lay off staff because the company executives can't figure out how to make money. Perhaps that should come before the chef? Why is it such a badge of pride to provide perks on other people's dime? Silicon Valley in a nutshell.

I read the word "pivot" and later in the article, it mentions their raise and valuation. It doesn't read like the layoff was money related, rather pivot related.

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#4
Unbearable read. Overflowing with intellectual elitism. Completely out of touch with reality. If this is PR [0], Evan Williams should demand a refund. I don't know, maybe this crap appeals to yuppies living in the coastal big cities? Tools like Twitter and Facebook have done more to connect more people of all income and education levels than anything else. Medium is not going to reach these people, who don't read the New York Times, let alone frequent quaint used bookstores.

Long form anything is going to continue being dead until we find a way to fix society so that families don't have to spend every waking moment struggling to pay the bills. All indications are that this problem will only accelerate as automation wipes out more jobs, with self-driving cars and trucks at the vanguard of this revolution. Stay tuned.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#5
Ev Williams is not trying to fix the web: he's trying to kill the web and to replace it with his own vision of what it should be.

> We never realized the potential of it that we saw with blogging and the open Internet. In the next three years, it’s going to look massively different and it will do well.

> The idea won’t be to start a website. That will be dead. The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/09/09/mediums-ev...

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#6
post #4

Unbearable read. Overflowing with intellectual elitism. Completely out of touch with reality. If this is PR [0], Evan Williams should demand a refund. I don't know, maybe this crap appeals to yuppies living in the coastal big cities? Tools like Twitter and Facebook have done more to connect more people of all income and education levels than anything else. Medium is not going to reach these people, who don't read the…

If we had this attitude --- nothing of greatness or substance or length will be tolerated until everyone can have unfettered access to it --- we'd still be living in caves. The future is always unevenly distributed. The solution is not to demand everything stop until everyone is equal, but to make sure no one is left behind in the long run.

Rejecting intellectual elitism is a huge mistake.

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#7
post #6
post #4

Unbearable read. Overflowing with intellectual elitism. Completely out of touch with reality. If this is PR [0], Evan Williams should demand a refund. I don't know, maybe this crap appeals to yuppies living in the coastal big cities? Tools like Twitter and Facebook have done more to connect more people of all income and education levels than anything else. Medium is not going to reach these people, who don't read the…

If we had this attitude --- nothing of greatness or substance or length will be tolerated until everyone can have unfettered access to it --- we'd still be living in caves. The future is always unevenly distributed. The solution is not to demand everything stop until everyone is equal, but to make sure no one is left behind in the long run. Rejecting intellectual elitism is a huge mistake.

I have no problem with Medium existing for the people who have the time and inclination to read it. I've enjoyed reading it myself. What raises my hackles is the suggestion that it'll replace Twitter.

Edit: Please don't conflate intelligence with intellectual elitism. One is a net good that is universally valued. The other is a form of patronizing and dismissive behaviour that leads to political polarization.

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#8
I'm getting tired of people saying "the ____ is broken" for everything, and always at the beginning of a pitch for a new vision of the world. I suppose having an alternative is better than an empty critique, but the business interest usually makes the new vision ring hollow to me.

Re: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: Ev Williams Is Trying to Salvage It

#9
post #2

Great phtograph of a beautiful kitchen, complete with a chef providing catered lunches, captioned with a description of how the company had to lay off staff because the company executives can't figure out how to make money. Perhaps that should come before the chef? Why is it such a badge of pride to provide perks on other people's dime? Silicon Valley in a nutshell.

If that was SV in a nutshell Bay Area after the Dot Com bust would look much more like Detroit.
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